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Osbert Parsley says

June 18, 2010 at 4:44 pm

Im not convinced that youve done justice to the arguments of classical music traditionalists.

Surely your book ought to address the best and most sophisticated possible arguments? I

havent read the books by Johnson or Kramer, but I read Finebergs Classical Music Why

Bother?and was less than impressed by the quality of argumentation.

(Roger Scruton, by the way, is less anti-pop than you make him out to be in his aesthetics

book, he is extremely negative about mainstream British pop groups of that era, such as Oasis

and U2, but his other writing, including his recent book Understanding Music, reveals him to be

an intelligent commenter on other forms of pop music.)

The argument for the special status of Western classical music would refer to the things that

make it special (a literate tradition of transmission, the privileging of large-scale forms and long-

range development), none of which are as highly prioritized in pop music (electronic

transmission, generally small-scale forms) or world folk musics (oral transmission, usually either

small-scale forms or longer static/sectional forms). Such music clearly must be judged by

different standards than that of pop music itll appeal to different part of the brain, and will be

used in different settings in differing times and places.

The argument would continue by pointing out that Western classical music is not only a

unique tradition, but its also the historical tradition of our culture meaning, the culture of North

America and Western Europe, that also gave us our tradition of painting, creative writing,

jurisprudence, and representative democracy. Because todays modern classical music is

contiguous with that tradition, it connects us with that past a connection which is desirablebecause it makes us aware of the ultimate foundations of our political and social order. Pop

music, by contrast, has entirely different aesthetic aims. You might say that pop music is to

classical music as hypertext fiction is to the traditional novel a new form that uses many

elements from the older form, but is clearly distinct, employing different aesthetic aims and

different media. Pop and classical music are clearly complementary forms, serving different

purposes, but its equally clear that the older form has a greater historical cachet and deserves

a privileged status.

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If put this way, the argument for Western classical music does not need to argue that its

simply betterthan other styles, which is clearly meaningless. Rather, its a frank admission that

there are different kinds of music with different cultural roles, requiring different kinds of

support.

This is an argument I find convincing, and to my mind this is the line of argument to which youll

have to respond if your book is going to be fully comprehensive.

Your last point is one of the main theses of my book. But then what wed

debate is what the cultural role of various musics might be, and what kind of

support they might deserve.

In my last riff, you might have read that classical musics historical role and

importance is half my definition of classical music (the other half being its

developmental nature). But this, I hope youll agree, is a double-edged sword.

It can be argued as Susan McClary does, for instance that classical

music of the past carries within it attitudes towards women (for instance) that

weve gotten past in the contemporary world. And also that classical music in

the past was the music of colonialism, and of philosophy in which the mind

had too much dominance over the body.

All these balances have been redressed in recent decades, but classical

music hasnt played much part in that. You can talk all you want about

classical music conveying the fine ideas that underly our civilization, but still

its true that major league baseball had black players years before the

Metropolitan Opera had black soloists.